(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus which displays a schedule table, such as a program table, and more particularly to an apparatus which extracts a part of the schedule table and displays the extracted part.
(2) Description of the Related Art
In recent years, as digital broadcasting has become popular, various programs have been getting broadcast. Further, with the wide use of electronic program guides (hereinafter, referred to as EPG), it has become possible to check, on a television screen, a schedule of programs to be broadcast. Furthermore, with the wide use of hard disks and DVDs, recording of the programs has been getting easier.
Under such circumstances, various technologies have conventionally been proposed to aid in easily selecting a program which a user desires, from a number of broadcast programs. One of such technologies is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-164217 publication, to provide a system in which user's preference for television programs is extracted based on a history of program recording reservation on a hard disk or the like, or a history of viewing programs, and then programs in matching with the preference are selected from programs to be broadcast, in order to be recommended. Another technology is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-253325 publication, to provide an apparatus which selects programs which a user desires, using information indicating whether or not recorded programs have been viewed. Still another technology is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent No. 2838892 publication, to provide a method of displaying an EPG in a table format arranged in broadcasting times by channels, so that a user can easily browse program information.
Still another technology is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-94893 publication and Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-23118 publication, to provide a method of deciding a priority of displaying program information in a program table, thereby efficiently displaying the program information. Still another technology is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 9-83891 publication, to provide a method of deciding the priority using a program viewing history.
However, there is a problem that the above-mentioned conventional technologies lack consideration for application to apparatuses, such as a portable telephone, which have a small display area. Therefore, due to such a small area, many bothersome operations are required to search for desired program information from the program table, for example.
In general, a portable apparatus, such a portable telephone, has constraints of a limited screen size, so that it is necessary to extract, from the table or the like, only a part which a user needs, and display the extracted part. For portable telephones, a standard display screen size is 240×320 dots, 2 to 3 inches. A screen of this size generally displays 9 lines each of which contains 10 characters. Although the same screen can display up to 380 characters by reducing a font size, screens of portable telephones have display constraints more than screens of in-home apparatuses. Therefore, in order to display program information on small-sized screens, such as screens of portable telephones, it is required to conceive another technology which is different from the conventional technologies for large-sized screens, such as screens of in-home apparatuses.
In the meanwhile, a terminal, such as a portable telephone, is always connected with a communication network, so that electronic mail, information via local radio waves, information regarding geographic positions, and the like, are asynchronously distributed without a user's intention. Even if such information is distributed when the user is browsing a program table or the like, it is necessary to keep displaying the program table or the like without preventing from the browsing, and also to enable the user to check the distributed information. For example, when a user is outdoors and is checking a program table using a portable telephone in order to reserve recording of a television program, if the user's portable telephone receives electronic mail, the user needs to delete the currently displayed program table from the screen, and change the current mode to a mode of checking mail, in order to check detail of the mail. Then, after checking the detail of the mail, the user has to resume the previous operations from the displaying of the program table, even if the user has once been in the middle of the operation of program recording reservation. Thus, for a purpose of increasing portability by users, the terminal, such as a portable telephone, is obligated to have a physically small display screen, so that it is difficult to simultaneously perform plural processing (browsing of the program table and browsing of the received mail, for example) on a single screen.